freitasm: Microsoft does a good job of bringing smaller, one day events to all main centres (and sometimes even to other smaller places) focusing in specific topics that may be of interest to SMEs - infrastructure, development, collaboration. Subscribe to the TechNet NZ newsletter or keep an eye on Nathan's blog and you will know when these happen.

I pinged Nathan about this the other day, he responded with some good links to mailing lists people should join as well.

I confess I've got much more FLOSS and linux focused so I'm a bit out of that scene, but I'd like to be more in it, so I joined the lists.

freitasm:

DonGould: When you run a SME, you can't just drop everything and leave the staff to support the systems and customers... there aren't an abundance of 'other people' to do what I do, and this is the same for many folk.

What makes you think the owner will benefit more from TechEd than the technical staff? The only reason I can think of is if the owner is the only technical person and staff is just users. Even so, I am not sure TechEd is a great conference for "owners".

Christchurch and the south is full of freelancers and small guys. We have many owners who are very technical people, not just 'managers'.

and this is a reason for not holding the event in Christchurch, if its the only national venue. if the event was there a lot of people simply wouldn't go as they are too scared of it (a big earthquake) happening again.